Testing, as a basis for whether you pass or fail a course is a ludicrous interpretation of what education truly is. Education is not rote memorization of facts for multiple choice questions. Learning to pass tests transforms the very essence of what it means to be educated. Prepping for tests rewards certain limited kinds of thinking, and penalizes deeper and more sustained reflection. A teacher in Oregon noted that "The tests are a collection of random multiple choice questions, demanding rote memorization, and the application of almost no higher level thinking skills if anything like this is implemented, teachers will have to substantially dumb down our curriculum to ensure students success." (Tests from hell, Bigelow) This system of constant testing will ruin education. Kids will never learn how to think, teachers will not be able to do real teaching, and education will lose it's excitement, and be just about taking tests.This attitude of rote memorization to pass test, is not at all like what you should expect in college, in college you must learn and interpret information, not just memorize and regurgitate information.
Education is not just test-taking, if we make learning just a process you go through to take another exam, then students will lose their excitement to learn, especially if they fail to pass . Johnothan Kozol says in his book, Savage Inequalities, "Students [in a very bad public school] take preliminary tests before they leave the eighth grade, eighty percent fail because of bad preparation, They enter highschool labeled failures and their entire ninth grade year becomes test preparation. They have learned that education is a brittle, abstract ritual to ready them for an examination. If they get to college they do not know how to think. They know how to pass the tests and this may get them into college, but it cannot keep them there. We teach them failure. (144 Savage Inequalities).
Desire to do well on these tests, captivates teachers and administrators to try to teach students how to pass exams rather than learn material. With pressure on staff in low performing schools to increase academic scores, many then focus on teaching how to take the test, rather than teaching the subject. Some teachers and administrators find their paychecks at stake. In fact there are many teachers who say that they taught students how to take exams first, rather than help their students learn the regular required material. Teaching in public schools then becomes about preparing for exams, as opposed to teaching students to love learning and think critically.
There is absolutely no way that these tests are ethnically unbiased. All tests are culturally biased in one form or another, and most of the test preparers are drawn from the dominant culture. How many Persian speakers have a P.H.D. in Education, which is what you need to be on the board of this exam? Cultural diversity does not just mean black and white: there is enormous cultural diversity in this state, and the committee that designs this exam could never represent all those cultural groups. Also, how are you supposed to test a student in on English written test, when they hardly understand the language. Those students are destined to fail, and just become another failing statistic.
Even though this test is the same throughout the state, it is unfair to compare all schools the same, because you are administering the test to students whose preparation has been quite varied and different. Teachers are also unequally prepared and some school districts have a larger percentage of unprepared teachers. Frequently, less money is spent on teachers, equipment and school buildings in some of these districts, and so their students' learning is inevitably impaired. Due to these circumstances, there is no way that we can judge these students based on the same standards. Also if school becomes just about testing and becomes removed from the essence of education, lots of the good teachers quit or leave the teaching profession.
The real world is not about tests, it is about performance. Performance does not always need to be evaluated by tests. If you want to know how students are really doing in school, help them to write, to speak, and demonstrate or complete real world projects where they incorporate their math, reading, writing and language skills for a purpose. Develop scoring systems to assess how they apply their learning to their real world projects
